How Fringe’s finale screwed up time paradoxes and ruined everything

Fringe-trailer

Spoilers! If you haven’t watched the most recent (and final) season of Fringe (which ended in January), then this post is going to ruin the ending for you. Also I’m going to talk about time paradoxes and stuff, but I’ll try to make it simple.

For a show based entirely on pseudo-scientific concepts that could never actually work, Fringe did an pretty good job of making everything that happened over its five-season run sound scientifically plausible. In fact, right up to the very last episode, every imaginable anomaly on the show was explained. They even played around with time travel and multiverse theory with pretty good results.

And then they screwed it up. In the last few minutes of the show, they basically ruined five years of storytelling with one mistake. A word of warning: if you thought Fringe had a mostly-happy ending, this post is going to ruin everything for you.

Continue reading →

BioShock Infinite is basically just Fringe

 

bioshock-fringe

Warning! I’m going to spoil the crap out of the TV show Fringe (up through season 2, at least) and the game BioShock Infinite.

I’m gonna go ahead and point out that I haven’t watched the season 2 finale of Fringe yet, but I mostly see where things are headed, and I’ve noticed a lot of parallels between that show and BioShock Infinite. Allow me to explain.

Continue reading →

The Path Not Taken: A full explanation of BioShock Infinite’s crazy finale

BioShock - Elizabeth

I’m writing this post to help those who have completed BioShock Infinite make sense of the confusing series of events that takes place at the end of the game. I’m going to try to make this as simple as possible, but we’re dealing with some very complex ideas, and that may not be entirely plausible.

Warning: Everything beyond this point contains massive spoilers for BioShock Infinite, including a detailed recap of the entire ending and backstory. I also spoil a major plot point from the original BioShock. Proceed at your own risk.

Continue reading →

How Ubisoft “marked and executed” the fun of Splinter Cell

In the video above, IGN demonstrates a new feature in the fifth Splinter Cell game. The feature, called Mark and Execute, allows you quickly take out up to four enemies at once with a guaranteed kill. It looks like a great new addition to Sam Fisher’s arsenal of hand-to-hand and firearms tactics, but it’s actually one of the worst single features added to the entire franchise. In fact, I’d say Mark and Execute could be even worse for the franchise than Splinter Cell: Double Agent. If you’ve ever played Double Agent, you know that’s a strong accusation. Obviously I plan to explain myself, so let me go ahead and do that. Continue reading →

Apple issues apology for lack of iOS Daylight Savings bugs, promises correction

Tim Cook published an apology on Apple’s website today addressing widespread criticism of the iPhone’s lack of Daylight Savings-related bugs.

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to create amazing products that integrate so deeply into the lives of those who use them that a simple timekeeping error could lead to riots in the streets of San Francisco (not that it takes much to do that).

I believe that we failed to do so with our latest iOS update, and I would like to apologize.

I awoke this morning to reports that iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad had failed to function improperly following the Daylight Savings time change that took place last night. This is outside of the behavior that most users have come to expect from our products.

To address this issue, we will be releasing an update to iOS shortly which will re-enable these problems.

Once again, on behalf of everyone at Apple, I apologize for this significant oversight. I sincerely hope that we can regain some of the trust that we lost today.

Tim Cook
Apple’s CEO

The iOS update mentioned in the letter is already available for all iOS 6 devices. The change log is below.

iOS 6.1.3 addresses the follow issues:

- Corrects an issue where iPhone could handle Daylight Savings without any problems

- Introduces several new bugs for the end of Daylight Savings

iOS 6.1.3 is recommended for all users.

The release means that Apple will once again have to rename the current iOS beta. It had previously been called “iOS 6.1.2,” but following an emergency bug fix release, it was renamed “iOS 6.1.3.” It seems that Apple will once again be forced to bump the version number if this beta to 6.1.4.

Review: Taco Bell’s Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco

IMG 0960

 NOTICE: This is a review of a pre-release product. This review makes no guarantees about the availability of the tacos on launch day. Some customers may experience long wait times or complete unavailability of the product. The taco reviewed here was the Supreme version, sans the tomatoes. I do not like tomatoes.

A few months ago, Taco Bell announced that they would be following up their unbelievably successful (and unbelievably delicious) Doritos Locos taco with a Cool Ranch variation. Across this great nation, people cried tears of pure happiness.

Today, we tasted the happy. And for once, it doesn’t taste like sad. It tastes like Cool Ranch Doritos. It tastes good.

Continue reading →

Going Rogue: How Twitter app developers can circumvent Twitter’s restrictions (and why they probably shouldn’t)

Expect to see a lot more tweets like the one above in the near future as popular Twitter clients across a variety of platforms reach the 100,000 API token limit imposed by Twitter, forcing them to stop accepting new users.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of API tokens and Twitter’s arbitrarily-set limit, I’ll attempt to explain this very quickly. Essentially, every user that logs into any given Twitter app requires a special string of text (a token) in order to use that app. Due to recent changes, Twitter only allows apps to hand out 100,000 of these tokens. What that means is that 100,000 people are allowed to login to any given Twitter app ever. Now, it’s possible for users to revoke their token for an app if they don’t use that app anymore, but the majority of users won’t do that. If the token is revoked, someone else can take that user’s spot in the 100,000. If not, that user will be counted as one of those 100,000 tokens forever, even if they aren’t using the app. So if you buy a Twitter app, login, decide it sucks, then delete it, you have taken up one of those limited slots and wasted it.

When a Twitter app runs out of tokens, people will no longer be able to login through it. Twitter simply blocks all new logins. App developers can request more tokens from Twitter, but Twitter is not obligated to comply.

Because of this, developers are forced to charge absurd amounts of money to ensure that only truly dedicated users will buy their apps, and that people who simply buy a cheap app and then stop using it won’t waste a token.

But what if there was a way around that limit? As it turns out, there kind of is, and it’s kind of a bad idea.

Continue reading →